Saturday, 13 September 2014

NEITHER GOD NOR CHAIRMAN (NOR HAIRCUT)

I started going to St James' Park with my friend Steve when Gordon McKeag was running things. Back then the chants of 'Sack the Board' were to the Gallowgate End what Hail Marys are to St Peter's - it was an act of both faith and penitence.

Much has changed at St James' in the thirty years since then, but the relationship between Newcastle supporters and the club's owners has remained more or less constant throughout.

The last time I saw my friend Steve was shortly after the announcement that Joe Kinnear had left Newcastle. I quoted Dorothy Parker's response to the news that Calvin Coolidge had died: How could they tell?

Steve let out a mirthless laugh. 'Some things in life you can always rely on: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and Newcastle United is run by bastards.'

This week it was suggested that Mike Ashley was looking to sell Newcastle and buy Glasgow Rangers. Ashley denied the notion and banned the Daily Telegraph from St James' Park. I wrote this during some earlier Ashley-inspired furore.

I was thinking of getting my hair cut next week, but in
light of recent events of St James’ Park I think I’ll just let it grow for a
while. When left to its own devices my hair twines itself into a feathery
silver bouffant giving me the look of someone who ought to be hosting a daytime
TV quiz show. Still, the occasional witty cry of “Let's play Mr & Mrs”
as I pass the smokers standing outside the local pubs will likely be better
than the alternative.

You see, my barber is a Newcastle season ticket-holder. Like
all Geordies he is keen on talking. The minute I sit down,
he whisks the nylon cape around me, pumps the chair lever, fires up his
clippers and starts in telling me what – in the prevailing view of his social
club – has been going on at the Toon of late. And he doesn’t stop snipping and
shaving until he’s finished. At times of high drama – and they come thick and
fast in Newcastle, let’s be honest – you need a buffer zone of extra hair to
fill the time. Otherwise, you’re going to go in and ask for a number three at
the back and sides and tidy-up on top and come out looking like Pierluigi Collina.

I discovered this the hard way the week after the
Hall-and-Shepherd-Fake-Sheikh fiasco. There were times during those
two-and-a-half hours when I seriously wondered if I was going to keep my ears,
I can tell you.

There is another barber in the town. But I abandoned him
after a previous incident. The other barber is a Newcastle season ticket-holder
too, but he is altogether more febrile and less focused. I was sitting in his
chair the day Kevin Keegan signed Alan Shearer. When a passing market trader yelled
the extraordinary news through the door, the barber leaped in the air, flung
down his comb and rushed out into the street singing that ancient Geordie hymn
of praise and deliverance, “Whack your lass with a Christmas tree ay-oh, ay-oh.'

In his euphoria the barber had apparently forgotten that for
the past five years he had ridiculed the Blackburn and England striker as
“Billy Bigpockets”. “You think he’s avaricious, then?” I asked him once. “I
wouldn’t know about that,” he replied as he squirted water on my head, “But
he’s a greedy bastard”.

I waited for the barber to return from his celebrations, but
he never did. The next time I saw him was later that evening on the local news
chanting outside St James’ Park. I went away with my hair half cut and hanging
asymmetrically across my brow. When I got on the bus to go home the man behind
me started whistling “Don’t You Want Me Baby”. I have not been back to that
barber since.

The peculiar antics of Mike Ashley have kept my hair in
squaddie-like shape ever since his arrival in the North-East. During that time
the rotund retail maverick has moved from being a seldom seen recluse to
somebody who appears on national TV downing a pint and watching the football
wearing the sort of blank yet benign expression adopted by the Queen when
attending a break-dancing display by disadvantaged youngsters. In the meanwhile
he has gradually edged away from being widely celebrated as a black-and-white
saviour, to the current position in which he seems to have achieved the
impossible – making Newcastle fans speak with wistful chuckles of the glorious,
happy stewardships of Gordon McKeag and Lord Westwood.

I exaggerate, of course. Though I couldn’t help noticing
that a few weeks ago my taxi driver – a wild-haired Yeti from the West Durham
boondocks - referred to the former-chairman known locally as Mr McGreed as “a
total shitehawk”. I feel the dropping of the words “and utter fucking' from the middle of that
description points to a growing rehabilitation of the egregious solicitor.

I doubt, however, that Lord Westwood (AKA The Pirate) will
ever again stride past The Strawberry without people yelling, “Where’s your
parrot, you thieving twat” at him. And since he has been dead for some
considerable time that’s probably just as well.

On my last visit to the barber’s at the end of July I was
unkempt and in need of a severe trimming, so I asked him what he made of
Newcastle’s lack of activity in the transfer market. “Ashley’s supposed to have
all this money, “ I said, “But he hasn’t spent any.”

“Aye, well, we’ve weighed it up from all angles,
haven’t we?” the barber said his scissors clicking demonically, “I mean, from
what you hear the bloke’s been hit by the fall of share values on Wall Street. There’s been the Northern Rock business…” he continued in this vein until the
floor around me was ankle deep in hair, “…and the general global economic
downturn, which is all mitigating circumstances, obviously. Credit to the fella
for making his fortune of his own bat, and maybe we don’t see the bigger
picture and everything, but at the end of the day the conclusion we’ve come to
is,” he paused for a moment to stare over my head and look me in the eye
via the mirror, “that he’s a right bull's knacker.'"Is that short enough, for you?”

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.